Until
recently, when the internet has made it possible for listeners from Nempnett
Thrubwell to New Orleans to tune in to his BBC London Live radio show,
Charlie Gillett was a world music DJ who had a great reputation but most
of our readers couldn't hear. Now you can - and lots do - listen to him
worldwide on the net and the BBC World Service. But Charlie's not just
the guru of world music radio (and assembler of occasional state-of-the
art world music compilation CDs like World 2000 and The World's All Yours)
of course. His Sound Of The City was one of the first major books about
popular music from the rock 'n' roll era, his compilation Another Saturday
Night was a major factor in breaking Cajun music in the UK, and less well
publicised is his role as a manager and publisher in the music biz mainstream.
I thought it was time we heard the whole story, beginning of course with
The Sound Of The City which had been his M.A. thesis from a mid-'60s year
at Columbia University in New York.

"I
wrote the thesis just as a way of rationalising to myself that I hadn't
entirely misspent my youth listening to records to no purpose. I was working
in America in an office, and in the evenings, when I'd finished my official
work, I was typing my thesis out. A woman came and stood in the doorway
for a little while, then she came over and said 'Gimme that. I can't bear
to see you go finger, finger, finger, finger.' And three days later she
handed me this immaculately typed thesis for which she accepted nothing
more than a box of chocolates."

"I
came back to England in 1966 and spent the next three or four years teaching
social studies and film making at
Kingsway College. We'd already got two kids at that time, and I had the
temerity after supper to sit down with the typewriter on my knee and bang
out something towards the idea of a history of rock 'n' roll, rhythm &
blues, all that. About two or three years into this process I get a letter
from America, from a man whose name I didn't recognise. He said 'You won't
know me, but it was my secretary who typed your thesis. I've since left
that company and I'm with so-and-so, and we've formed a book publishing
company. I wondered if you've ever thought of turning that thesis into
a book.'"

"I
sent him the manuscript of where I was at the time. He wrote a really
nice letter back saying, 'Well, as I said, I would like to turn that thesis
into a book. What you've got here isn't a book, but with a bit of work
I think we can turn it into one.' So we then worked on it a couple of
years more, and that turned into Sound Of The City.

"When
I first encountered Charlie at the 1968 London Blues Convention, he was
on the bill as an 'expert', but I can't now remember what had got him
to that status.

"Well,
when I came back from America I tried every way I could to get either
into the press or radio, and trying to get people to accept the idea of
a book about popular music. I got rejections across the board."

Charlie
got a few breaks from New Society and Anarchy, and eventually struck up
a relationship with Tony Cummings' soul magazine Shout! "I came up with
this idea that I could start to serialise where I'd got to, writing Sound
Of The City, chapter by chapter. If I printed it straight onto the Gestetner,
all he had to do was run it off. He was really happy because it saved
him a whole load of secretary time, and I was really happy because it
gave me feedback then, from the experts who were reading this thing, correcting
me left, right and centre. All my career, I've been amazed at the tolerance
of my ignorance and mistakes by everybody. Everybody just accepts my good
intentions and says 'You didn't get this right', while there are other
people who make one mistake and everybody jumps on them like a ton of
bricks. I've shamelessly used the fact that there are people who know
more than me, but will generously share their knowledge, expecting nothing
back except that they've set the record straight."

"Somewhere
along the line, I was still trying to get into the NME and the Melody
Maker and all those, and I wrote to the Record Mirror because I noticed
that at the back they had a kind of classified ad section with people
selling old Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis 78s: this was '68, I think.
I wrote to the editor and said 'You have nothing in the editorial of your
paper that deals with that audience, who are clearly buying your paper
for those ads. I could do a column for you for them.' And the guy called
me up and said 'Do you want to come in and we'll talk about it?' I went
in, wondering what else I could say to persuade him, and he said 'When
can you start? Next week?' So when people ask me how do you get started
in this game, it's my advice that you have to somehow see something that
nobody's doing that you could uniquely do. That's almost my only philosophy.

"Everything
changed when Sound Of The City came out, in America first in 1970, and
1971 here. Charlie was soon involved in television; a music panel show
with Michael Parkinson; a series of artist profiles including B.B. King,
the Drifters, Labi Siffre and Gilbert O'Sullivan; an early arts review
programme. Then he got a call from Michael Appleton offering him a presenter
gig on The Old Grey Whistle Test.

"In
normal circumstances one would have said yes, but a parallel thing had
happened where BBC Radio London had started up. I listened to it a couple
of times and couldn't understand why it was so bland. So I wrote in my
Record Mirror column, saying 'Why aren't they playing" two or three soul
records that I was besotted about at the time. During the week a voice
rang up and said 'My name's Robbie Vincent. I'm a DJ on Radio London.
Why don't you come in with these records you think we should be playing
and we'll see what the listeners think of you.' So he had me come in and
he acted as a devil's advocate on air saying 'Well, should we be listening
to this?' and asking listeners to call in. And lots of listeners called
in and said it sounded great."

"I
came off the air and the head of the station said 'Have you ever thought
about going on the radio?' I said 'Only since I was 15!' So in a couple
of months I had my own show. When Michael Appleton said 'Do you want to
be on Whistle Test?' I thought 'Not really. I want to be in charge of
what I'm doing'. On the Whistle Test I was going to have to be talking
to people like Yes, and Emerson Lake & Palmer or whatever, and really
I couldn't imagine what I would say to them. So there have been one or
two things that I have said no to, which most people in my position wouldn't
have done, and I've never for a second regretted.

"Charlie
presented the influential Honky Tonk on BBC Radio London from March 1972
until the end of 1978, during which time his support and broadcasting
of demos by then-unknowns was most famously responsible for the career
breaks of bands like Dire Straits. After a year off, he moved to London
commercial station Capital with a show called Undercurrents.

"There
was some really interesting stuff on independent labels which Capital
Radio wasn't covering. I did an hour's show on all independent labels,
whatever I could find. And then that was a bit restricting so they said
I could do a two-hour show. That was then The Alchemists, which was a
variation on what I'm doing now. The crucial turning point was people
like Joe Jackson coming in and playing salsa, and King Sunny Ade."

"In
the '50s I had a cousin who had been in Ghana and Nigeria and came back
with yellow label Decca 78s, and I did like it but didn't connect it to
the other stuff that I liked. It was a sort of exotic other thing. And
in 1973 I played Manu Dibango's Soul Makossa five times! It was one of
those records. I didn't know anything about it. It wasn't a novelty record,
it was much more, an amazing, powerful dance record. And I played Tabou
Combo on Honky Tonk - it was one of those tracks that was about seven
minutes long and I played a lot of it. But as I say, I hadn't joined it
up. The seed was there. The guys out of The Beat, in 1982, said 'We were
listening to African music as we were making the Beat's records'."

"I
was sacked in 1983, and very surprisingly to me there was a strong reaction
from the audience, so they decided to bring me back, but not doing the
same thing. That was when I came up with this 'I don't know about foreign
music, but the audience does, so if I jump into the deep end, they will
help me out with what I don't know'. That was A Foreign Affair. Later
I changed the name to A World Of Difference or City Beats - I don't remember
which was which - I think it was still being called A World Of Difference
when it all ended. The last day of 1990 was the last day at Capital.

"Charlie's
'80s residency on Capital's airwaves was a major catalyst and important
neighbourhood noticeboard, without which the whole evolution of world
music in the UK would have been very different. Indeed, within months
of leaving Capital (the expression 'jumped before he was pushed' may be
appropriate), Charlie won the Sony Gold Award for being the best UK broadcaster
of the previous year. But apart from doing in-flight programmes for British
Airways and occasional guest appearances or deputising for others, it
wasn't until May 1995 that he returned to full time broadcasting on BBC
Radio London's successor, GLR (now metamorphosised into BBC London Live).

"I
rang the head of GLR and introduced myself and said 'I was just wondering
if there was any chance of me coming in', and she said 'What, you'd be
interested in being on GLR?' and I said I'd be very interested. She said
'But you're on Kiss' and I said 'Once, I went on Jonathan Moore's show
at 3 o'clock in the morning for an hour, does that count?' No, no, it's
Jazz FM then', she said. And I said 'Twice. I did two shows sitting in
for Ian Anderson. I don't think that counts.' So a couple of months later,
there I was on GLR. The fact was that when I went off the air at Capital
not a single radio station got in touch with me. And it has generally
been the case." Early on in his radio and writing career, Charlie had
also eased into the management, recording and music publishing side of
the business.

We
jump back to 1971

"Sound
Of The City came out and I was completely astonished by the positive reaction
to it, especially in America. I had just written it trying to sort out
things for myself. I wanted to get the sequence of what happened and why,
and the fact that it seemed to me that the roots of American popular music
were black. Having had that as my reason for writing Sound Of The City,
I kind of got it out of my system. And it was so difficult writing a book,
so stressful and exhausting, and all the time you're pushing this boulder,
thinking 'Nobody's going to be interested in this.' When they said, as
a result of all the positive reaction, 'What are you going to do next?'
I came up with what I thought was an answer which would result in them
saying, 'We're not going to do that'. I said 'I would like to meet the
people of Atlantic Records. Their story is fascinating and covers the
same period, and if you pay my expenses so that I can go there and meet
everybody that I have to talk to.' But they said yes, and paid me $3,000,
which was a lot of money in 1972."

"I
went out there and did the interviews, came back and I'd just finished
writing when a friend of mine, Gordon Nelki, who was my dentist at the
time, said 'What else could you do?' I said 'I suppose run a record label'
- this was 1972. And he said 'What's entailed in that?' and I said 'I
don't really know. But what I would put out on my record label if I had
one is some of the music from Louisiana that I've been playing which you
can't get here.' 'Oh' he said, 'well, why don't we start one up?' So we
went down to New Orleans and Louisiana and had some really funny, absurd
negotiating debates with people and then met the wonderful Floyd Soileau
of Jin and Swallow Records in Ville Platte. In New Orleans, before we
got to Ville Platte, we're playing pool in a bar and the juke box is just
playing whatever it's playing, and suddenly this version of Promised Land
comes on which nearly makes me push my cue through the baize. It was what
we now know as Johnny Allen's version of Promised Land. I looked and I
found what was playing and worked out it was B28 or whatever, and it's
on Jin Records, which is the label we're going to go to, which is wonderful.
So when I'm walking in the door and he's putting his hand out, I'm saying
'Have you got Johnny Allen's Promised Land?' He said 'Yeah, yeah, calm
down. What are you interested in that for? It's a B-side.' I said 'I heard
it in New Orleans. It's got to be on our album.'"

"He
agreed a fee of something like $20 a track and a very reasonable royalty
and said 'Just take away as many 45s as you want. Let me know the ones
that you want the tapes of, and I'll supply them.' So we spent ages putting
this compilation together out of all that. And of course I didn't have
any contacts in the industry as such. We got turned down by a couple of
people and I don't know what we were going to do next."

"Meanwhile I'm playing records on the radio still, and a couple of people
tell me I've got to go and see this band called Kilburn & The High Roads.
It took two different people a couple of times, and eventually I went
to see them. This was Ian Dury's group. And I was absolutely knocked out
by them. I came back and said to the listeners, 'You have to go and see
this group. They're just extraordinary.' I went to see them again, and
the third time I took Gordon as well. It was the days when the same band
would play two sets with a gap in the middle, and in one of the gaps the
singer hobbled over to us and said 'Oy. You keep saying these nice things
about us, why don't you manage us?' So I turned to Gordon and said 'Did
you hear that?' and he said 'Yeah, why not?' So that was the next 18 months
of our lives spoken for, which was horrendous, basically."

"What
we did was get a deal for them with Warners, a label called Raft. We persuaded
Raft to make an album and on the day, literally, on the day we walked
in with the finished masters the guy said 'I'm really sorry, the label's
been closed down'. So we then shopped this album - it wasn't a very good
record, it didn't represent the magic of the band, unfortunately - and
in our shopping around we drew a blank except at relatively recently formed
Virgin, where the two A&R guys were Simon Draper and Jumbo Vanrenen. And
Jumbo particularly liked The Kilburns. We went back to Ian and he said
'I don't want to be on a label with a bunch of hippies. They've got Hatfield
& The North, that's going to be very confusing. I want to be on a label
with Max Bygraves!' And they went off and signed up to Pye Records. We
went back with our tails between our legs to Virgin, who we really liked,
and they said 'Haven't you got anything else' and we said 'Well, we've
got this compilation of stuff we did from Louisiana' and they said 'Wonderful!'
So that's how Another Saturday Night came out, two years after we'd put
it together."

"It
took another four years before Ian surfaced, but when he did he deliberately
put There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards, a song that we published,
on the B-side of Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. It was the first song
that made any money for us - 10,000 each for us and the writer."

"We
found Lene Lovich and placed her with Stiff Records, and Lucky Number
was literally the next single on Stiff after Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick.
That was a Top 3 hit in Britain and sold half a million here and all over
the place, so that made quite a bit too. And then in 1981 Gordon and I
were in the basement of my house, which is where our office was at the
time, and somebody just came down the steps and put a cassette through
the door and went away again. That was a group called Direct Drive, whose
keyboard player turned out to be Paul Hardcastle. 11 records later, 19,
which we published, sold nearly 3 million in the world, in 1985."

One
of those will keep you ticking over for quite a while. "It really does,
for such a small operation. Plus I'd bought a house in 1969 for so low
a price that my mortgage was less than my paper bill, and I only have
a paper a day That allowed me to do all these things getting paid incredibly
little. 8 for doing my Record Mirror column and another 8 for doing Radio
London, only earning 25 a week, or something insane, but with a very low
mortgage and a very understanding wife, you can just get away with it.
Then we had a couple of Top 10 things in the late '80s, one was Carey
Johnson, and we put out something called The Jack That House Built by
Jack 'n' Chill. And the most recent one was Touch & Go."

I
wonder if, through his experiences of how the mainstream makes hits, Charlie's
approach to his role as world music DJ shows a different perspective to
others. Most world music radio presenters are forever struggling to balance
the deluge of material with severely restricted hours. There are so many
CDs arriving, you perhaps manage to air one track off each and that's
it. Charlie, unusually, will take one track off an album and play it six
weeks in a row.

"Very
rarely six weeks in a row. The one disadvantage that I never anticipated
about making a living out of my hobby is that I don't really get a chance
these days to live with and enjoy an album and get besotted by it in the
way that I used to before I became professionally involved. So if there's
a track I really, really like, I haven't represented that by only playing
it once. It's partly my obligation to this record for pleasing me so much.
It definitely is also affected by which track people respond to when they
call in during the show: 'What was that?' and so on."

"I
continue to get the greatest enjoyment from setting two or three records
alongside each other which have no generic relationship yet feel as if
they enhance each other - they may come from different times and places
but share a sound, an emotion, a detail. While some of these are records
I discover as I pick my way amongst the packets that come through the
door in a daily avalanche, and others are remembered from records filed
away on my shelves, some are introduced by my guests who bring their different
points-of-view on a regular (more or less bi-weekly) basis."

"Momo
Wandel Soumah is a very good example. One place I have in the system of
things is to be like a stage in a relay. Lucy Duran brought it on to my
show and that was the first time I heard it. It came on at about seven
minutes to the hour, and the track is 7 minutes 40 long, and I thought
'Alright, I'll play about three or four minutes of this and then fit in
three minutes of another record', but there was no way to stop that record
playing all the way out. I had to have a copy of that myself, and it turned
out that Lucy herself had been introduced to it by Katharina Lobeck. Katharina
gave me a copy that I was then able to play again, and the reaction really
came in the second time I played it. And that is sometimes the case, that
the audience doesn't necessarily get it as fast as I do. So then on and
on it goes. It's not six weeks in a row, it's six times in a period of
four months, which is in some ways even more effective. When I played
Krok, that song which starts with a ticking clock, that was similar. Every
time I played it."

"I'm
also aware that even though this audience has proved to be remarkably
open-minded towards the unknown, each of us can only take in so much unfamiliar
material before it all begins to blur. So in addition to going back to
'oldies' as a comfortable reference I also use the repeat plays of newer
releases as a place where people can in effect recover their breath from
all the new stuff."

"When
we first got interested in the '80s, we coincidentally had the benefit
of the emergence of Youssou N'Dour and Salif Keita in particular, and
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. There were a number of very, very charismatic genre
leaders who - having in effect been discovered by us, as it were - did
actually mean something outside that. Johnny Walker played Salif Keita
on Radio 1 at the time. The world music scene is missing a newer generation
of these type of people. Is this a responsibility for the people like
myself and Andy and Lucy, now she's there on Radio 3, to somehow can you
do it as a conspiracy, 'these are the people to go for'? I don't think
so. It's a more natural process than that. But until then the people who
are outside this circle are just left with confusion. There are too many
different names."

In
sorting out this confusion, there has long been a symbiosis between fRoots
as the main magazine, and Charlie and the other key world music radio
presenters. People's ears are perked by something on the radio, then they
can read about it in our pages and they've got the purchase information
and more background. It works the other way round as well - radio fleshing
out the written word so that a writer's enthusiasms get the aural dimensio

"The
case immediately springs to mind where Jenny Cathcart wrote the fRoots
article about Viviane N'Dour, so I pursued Viviane's record and played
it, and through that Max Reinhardt and Rita Ray heard it and put it onto
their Shrine compilation. Then they were part of the panel that resulted
in her headlining at the Barbican the other day, which is a lovely chain
of events."

"It's
a truism of marketing in general that one thing doesn't have an impact,
it's the reinforcement of three or four things. That's why, in big advertising
campaigns, you see the ad on TV but it's the still on the poster as you're
driving along the road that reinforces, then a magazine picture of the
same thing, and gradually you think 'OK, I've got the message'. So this
is our own little version of that, and it's essential."

Finally,
where do you sense things are going at the moment? "Multi-racial, multi-cultural
groups could be the thing of the future here: it's been surprising to
me how long it's taken to get going. Then, there is this Frikyiwa thing,
just to use it as an example, of the mixing of the beats and the really
great voices. Like you had recommended me a Nawaha Doumbia record; a year
later Frikyiwa sampled it and I go back to it and there it is. I'm a bit
slow. Somebody we know is in EMI Publishing, and in the last six months
they have had nine different clearances to sort out from Saudia Arabia
EMI, in other words western musicians on a large scale are sampling Arab
music and clearing it. The whole Mediterranean is a very interesting area.
Even when I did The World's All Yours in 1995 it was already the case
then. The largest number of people came from that. So where's it all going?
To the Mediterranean."

Charlie
finishes on a generous and positive note, a notable Gillett characteristic
in a music world often populated by Eeyores. "One of the most gratifying
experiences I've had in this 20 year period has been the World Circuit
story. An organic growth with nobody involved having any marketing mind.
Just Nick Gold, since he took over the company, following his own instincts.
And then at the Baobab gig, you suddenly realise 'Oh my God, he's done
it again'. I'm sure Nick would say that it was Baobab that was the starting
point for him of getting into all this music in the first place. And as
we know, the Buena Vista Social Club recording session was a disaster.
He had planned to record African and Cuban musicians together but the
Africans never showed up. Talk about the best things happening from the
worst."